Tuesday, 29 May 2012

US national security agencies increasingly use computerized analysis of collected data to designate a person as an enemy combatant.

The US currently uses non-judicial Presidential "hit lists" to simplify the killing of people (including US citizens) designated as enemy combatants.

The US is rapidly increasing its use of drones to kill enemy combatants nearly anywhere in the world 24x7x365.

The scary part is that the combination of these trends is the path of least resistance to an automated totalitarianism.

For those of you out of the loop on what is going on, it probably seemed to be a bit of a stretch. Particularly, the idea that the President could put American citizens on a military hit list without going through a judicial process.

If you were skeptical on the existence of a hit list, here's an article from today's (almost on cue) New York Times.

Some choice bits from the article. It shows there are still humans in the loop, although the process used to nominate people (including Americans) to kill is largely ad hoc.

Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical.

Obama ... insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war.

Obama’s ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron P. Munter, has complained to colleagues that “he didn’t realize his main job was to kill people"

a disputed method for counting civilian casualties... counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials...

“It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,” the official said. “They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.”

It [the hit list nomination process] is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.

This secret “nominations” process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia.

The video conferences are run by the Pentagon, which oversees strikes in those countries, and participants do not hesitate to call out a challenge, pressing for the evidence behind accusations of ties to Al Qaeda.

Friday, 25 May 2012

I recently did a series of interviews for an international venture investing newsletter called Capitalist Exploits. Here's a question I got that I thought we be of interest to GG readers. I've extended the answer a bit from the original in the interview.

Mark: Switching gears just a bit... We've watched the SOPA/PIPA controversy, now its CISPA; the "Stellar Wind" project was featured in Wired last month, and recently an NSA whistleblower, former Director William Binney, came out and said flat out that the government is lying, they intercept and store everything we do, Constitution be damned. It seems the government won't stop until it completely controls the flow of information on the Internet and has the ability to monitor and record everything we say and do online. You're a counter-terrorism expert, how much of this is hype and how much of it is really necessary to safeguard national security, in your opinion. And what about our civil liberties and right to privacy?

John: It’s a mixed bag. There’s certainly lots of concern in regards to how the NSA gathers data on US citizens. Added to what the private sector is gathering, its safe to conclude that we don’t have any privacy.

For example, nearly every new phone sold today has a GPS chip in it. It’s constantly gathering data on where that phone is and sending it to the phone company. All of that phone company data, from all of the phone companies across the world, is aggregated and provided to select governments for use in counter-terrorism. In short, the three billion people that are using cell phones are being tracked in order to help find and kill a couple hundred terrorists (its contribution is probably limited to being the primary source for neutralizing a couple of terrorists a year).

What do they do with this data? All of the public and private data collected -- from credit card purchases to library records to Internet usage to GPS cell phone data to EZPass info to aerial photos -- is being constantly analyzed by computers for what is called a “terrorist profile.” This network analysis software is looking for patterns of activity that would indicate a specific person is a terrorist, or part of a terrorist cell. The problem with this analysis? It doesn’t work if you don’t have a starting point, a known terrorist, that you can work outwards from. If you don’t have a reference point, the analysis generates too many false positives to be of use.

This analysis gets really scary when you consider that a US President can now designate any US citizen an enemy combatant without going through a judicial process. This list of enemy combatants is the equivalent of hit list. What does it take to get put on this list? How big can this list get? Nobody knows. It's probably safe to assume that this list will become increasingly automated over time with nearly zero human oversight (just guidance).

On top of all of this, killing people designated as terrorists is getting much, much easier. When I was in counter-terrorism, getting to the bad guys and back safely was risky. Every operation put dozens of people at extreme risk. Now, all you need is an armed drone. Armed drones are killing hundreds of people a year now in Pakistan. Drones, instead of troops and airplanes, are increasingly becoming the way the US controls the world. From a political perspective, using drones is nearly costless. No shot down pilots on TV. No body bags. All it costs is money, and less and less money as drones get smaller, smarter, and more deadly.

So, if you combine the automation of terrorist identification with an administrative “hit” list with automated drones that execute the order, you have a global killing machine. A machine that requires very few people to run and can kill almost anyone. A machine that will eventually be able to close the loop from a data trigger (enough to ID a person as a threat and provide a location for where that person is) to a kill shot in in a matter of minutes.

What will be done with it? If we end up in a disorderly economic depression, as it increasingly looks like we will, we’re going get a good demonstration of what life under automated authoritarianism feels like.

Last word. There’s also a whole host of laws and regulations that are aimed at restricting our freedoms in favor of the Intellectual Property mafia. They want the ability to censor everything we see and shut down web sites if there is even a whiff of IP infringement. Massive, automated censorship is going on now. Google blocks 300,000 URLs a week from its search results due to corporate pressure. Are all of these requests to block infringing content reviewed? No. It’s automated. It’s non-judicial. It’s simply corporate censorship.

Wednesday, 09 May 2012

It's the RQ-7 Shadow armed with a Shadow Hawk smart bomb (Mike Hanlon over at Gizmag did a great job with his article).

Drone + smart bomb is a scary combo. Why? As Hanlon points out, it is much cheaper than the manned alternatives. The solution for maintaining expansive ambitions despite shrinking budgets.

Over the longer term, tech trends dictate, we're going to see this type of system get less and less expensive. Also, each generation getting smarter and smarter, eventually reaching a high level of autonomy.

Given the precision of this smart bomb (8" from over a mile away), you don't need much explosive to do signficant damage.

In an anti-personnel role, we'll see smart glide bombs shrink to 1/2 a pound apiece or less. The smaller the better.

On Brave New War

G. Gordon Liddy Show (radio)...this is a seminal book in the truest sense of the term.. way ahead of the curve... go out and buy it right now -- G. Gordon Liddy

City JournalRobb has written an important book that every policymaker should read -- Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit)

Small Wars JournalWithout reservation Brave New War is for professional students of irregular warfare and for any citizen who wants to understand emerging trends and the dark potential of 4GW -- Frank Hoffman

Scripps Howard News ServiceA brilliant new book published by terrorism expert John Robb, titled "Brave New War," hit stores last month with virtually no fanfare. It deserves both significant attention and vigorous debate... - Thomas P.M. Barnett

Chet Richards DNIJohn has produced an important book that should help jar the United States and other legacy states out of their Cold War mindset. You can read it in a couple of hours – so you should read it twice...

Washington Times / UPIRobb correctly finds the antidote to 4GW not in Soviet-style state structures such as the Department of Homeland Security, but in decentralization -- William Lind (the father of 4th generation warfare).

Robert PatersonHaving painted a crystal clear picture of how a war of networks is playing out, he comes to an astonishing conclusion that I hope he fills out in his next book.

The Daily DishJohn Robb of Global Guerrillas has written the most important book of the year, Brave New War. - Daily Dish (The Atlantic)

Simulated LaughterWell-written. Brave New War reads more like an action novel than a ponderous policy book. - Adam Elkus

FutureJackedGo buy a copy of this book. Now. If you are low on cash, skip a few lunches and save up the cash. It is worth it. - Michael Flagg

ZenPunditThe second audience is composed of everyone else. Brave New War is simply going to blow them away. - Mark Safranski

Haft of the SpearThere aren’t a lot of books that make me recall a 12-year-old self aching for the next issue of The Invincible Iron Man to hit the shelves. Well done.
- Michael Tanji

Ed ConeHis book posits an Army of Davids -- with the traditional nation state in the role of Goliath. - Ed Cone (Ziff Davis)

Shloky.comThis is the first real text on next generation warfare designed for the general population and it sets the bar high for following acts. It is smart, it is a short read, and it will change your thinking. - Shlok Vaidya

Politics in the ZerosI suggest this is something Lefties need to start thinking about now, as that decentralized world is coming. - Bob Morris